I AM NOT YVONNE NELSON

FOREWORD The legendary Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, once said, “If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.” Writing one’s own story helps to cure the misrepresentation and inaccuracies that are likely to occur if one’s story is told by others. However, writing one’s story does not come easy. Anyone who decides to write his or her own story is often confronted with the dilemma of how far to go, how much to reveal, and how clean the writer should look in the story. In most cases, such stories come out with exaggerated virtues of the writer.

The rough edges are often trimmed, and all the creases about their lives are neatly ironed out, leaving an almost perfect account of an obviously imperfect person. In this book, however, Yvonne Nelson has decided to be different. With a special kind of boldness, she has opened the door into her life without first cleaning up the messy aspects of it. It’s like waking up and posing for the camera without any makeup on. Considering the society in which the author operates and is familiar with, it is a rare act of bravery to write the things contained in this book. This book is not an ordinary autobiography. It is a search for an answer to a question that has nagged the author since her childhood. It chronicles a journey that starts unassumingly but auspiciously in Dansoman, gets gloomy and bleak after Aggrey Memorial AME Zion Secondary School in Cape Coast, and sets the stage for the author’s struggles; a struggle against failure and the desertion that comes with it, a struggle which later becomes the fight against the pitfalls of fame and success. In essence, this book recounts an endless struggle by the author to discover herself and her place in the world. She faces a fair dose of ups and downs. As with all human stories, there are surprises and dramatic ironies that are known, perhaps, only to Providence. For instance, Aggrey Memorial, which she despises so much turns out to be the right place that prepares her for the success that would define her life. In the midst of the struggle for success and against the battles that come with it is the bigger and overriding theme of the story. It begins on the first page and ends on the last—the mystery about the author’s father. This story has almost all the elements of fiction. However, the major conflict of the story remains unresolved as the reader closes the pages and wonders what is next. Those whose perception of celebrities is defined by glittery photographs on glossy magazine covers with stories that contain glossier portrayals of the celebrities’ lives will find this book revealing, if not shocking. It lays bare the struggles and failures and fears of the men and women who, at some point or the other, own the screens of our television sets. This book also gives an insider’s perspective of female celebrities and settles the debate about whether sex-for-roles in the movie industry is a perception or reality, at least in Nigeria and Ghana. Above all, it also subtly reveals the power celebrities wield. The success story of the author’s protest against Ghana’s power crisis in 2015 and the visit by President Akufo-Addo’s close associate to convince her to contest a parliamentary seat on the ticket of the NPP in 2020 attest to the power celebrities wield beyond the entertainment circles. This is a book that is bound to ruffle feathers and ignite wild debates, but those who read it objectively and without the judgmental binoculars will see the story of a young woman—fallible like all other mortals— who is determined to leave a mark despite the internal and external forces that have erected high hurdles in her way. Manasseh Azure Awuni (Ghanaian Journalist and Author) April 2023 Life, they say, begins at 40. This saying is rooted in the belief that, by a person’s fourth decade on earth, he or she should have laid the foundations necessary for a smooth and more rewarding take-off into the next half of his or her existence on earth. If this saying is anything to go by, then my life is yet to begin. I will be 38 in November; and per the constitution of Ghana, no person below 40 years is eligible to be elected president of the country, even if he or she is able to carry the entire nation to the moon and back. So why am I in a hurry to write my memoir before I turn 40? Do I think I have achieved so much that this stage of my life deserves a book? Have I reached the pinnacle of my goals and ambitions? I have covered quite a distance, but what I envisage before me is more ambitious than what is behind me. So, I am not writing this because I think I have peaked. It is said that a person’s speed in the battle of life is determined by the speed of his or her pursuer. That which is determining the speed of my run started its vicious and supersonic pursuit before I was born. I have been running in silence, apart from a few hints I have dropped here and there in some major media interviews. Some people, mainly bloggers and reporters in the entertainment industry, have tried to take the disjointed bits and pieces and weave their own stories about my life. They have tried to convince their audience that their version of my story is the one and only definitive account. Some of those strange stories sound like works of fiction grounded in real-life scenarios, at least with a real character. I have engaged in some firefighting in the past, trying without much success, to extinguish some flames of untruths, half-truths and outright misinformation. Correcting other people’s accounts of me is, however, not the reason I am telling my own story at this stage. I am not here to seek sympathy or validation. I am not here to challenge anyone’s version or correct anyone’s narrative. I am writing because I have a story to tell. I am here to be real. I am here to open up, especially to a generation of young women that needs the truth to make decisions. I am here to find the most important answer to the most nagging question about my life. I was barely out of my teen years when fate thrust me in a career that makes the limelight inevitable. Being in that limelight comes with its own etiquettes. You are required to conform to the etiquettes and swim along the tide. You are expected to move with the flow, even if it runs counter to your reality. Being called a celebrity is a bestowment of a package on you. It sometimes comes with unrealistic demands and expectations. You have to live for the people. You have to learn the celebratory cues and act on them as if your very existence depended on them. Your reality does not matter if it does not align with the make-believe reality of show business. The industry requires one to act out one’s real life in much the same way a script containing someone’s imagination should be acted out. You have to always smile to the lenses of the prying crowd. You have to conceal your weaknesses. You have to hide your tears and fears. But there comes a time one finds truer meaning to life, a calling and a cause more fulfilling than the real and imaginary applauses in the market square of stardom. There comes a time one has to be real with oneself. There comes a time when one feels compelled to let the world into one’s life and show them the other side, the real side. This, I feel, is my time. In so doing, I intend to help future generations of young women that are hungry for fame and would do anything to make a name. I do not intend to decide for them or dissuade them from following their dreams. I intend to show them the whole picture. I intend to give them the ingredients to prepare their own meals of life. I intend to show them the human side of celebrity life. I intend to show them that celebrities are nowhere near the status of superhuman species. Behind the expensive make-up, glittering edited photos and enhanced videos are human beings who have blemishes—physical and emotional— just like everyone else. They have their weaknesses, their fears and disappointments, just like everyone else. It is true that a female celebrity will likely have teeming men, known and unknown men, dying to get her attention. But it is also true that she, too, struggles to get the attention of the man she loves, who may not love her back. I intend to show young women entering the movie or showbiz industry that they have hard choices to make. They have to choose between growing organically with dignity or leapfrogging into overnight stardom with unspeakable compromises. I intend to show them that they will suffer for their stubborn refusal to earn a place on the big stage with their body. In telling my story, I have made the hard decision not to sanitise it. I have told it in its raw form. Knowing my society and the high “moral” standard by which its women are measured, it is like taking an uninsurable risk in an already perilous endeavour. However, I want whoever looks up to me to see the whole package. I have had my low and my high moments. I have done things that I’m proud of and things I could never talk openly about until I decided to write this book. I have run and completed some races. In others, I have faltered and crashed. All of that has shaped me and made me the woman I am. I intend to show those who look up to me the scars of my falls, with the hope that they may avoid the landmines that nearly ended my life. Above all, the main reason I decided to write this book precedes my birth. I have searched in all the possible places for answers but failed. So, I am telling this story with the hope that I will find answers that will stop the tears that only my pillow can adequately bear witness to. I am telling my story to discover myself.

CHAPTER ONE

A Teacher’s Question What turned out later to be a frantic search and a lifelong fight for my true identity began rather nonchalantly. The trigger was a simple question from a teacher who wanted to cure his casual curiosity. It was a question whose answer I thought I knew without having to scratch my young head, but I ended up racking my adult brain for years, employing scientific methods, and conducting my own investigations but without the corresponding reward for the effort. Every now and then, different variations of that question return to haunt me like a horrifying ghost. I grew up with a void in my life, but it really didn’t mean much to me until that fateful afternoon when my Primary Five class teacher, Mr. B.B. Grant, summoned me to his desk, in front of the classroom. As I approached his desk, another boy in my class also scampered toward us. The teacher had called him too. I did not have the faintest hint about why the two of us were Mr. Grant’s subjects of interest and summons, but it would not take forever to find out. Eugene Nelson was one of the neatest and most handsome boys in the class. As young as he was, he had an aura of respectability around him. Apart from his attitude when provoked, which those in his circles had endured a few times in the past, I could not say anything negative about him. We were not friends. We had our different cliques because our personalities—which were polar opposites—could not contain us in the same group. From afar, I liked Eugene, and that was just it. Even if I had any crush on him, I kept it to myself. To be called to our class teacher’s table together, therefore, set me on edge until Mr. Grant spoke. “Are the two of you related?” he asked. It was a question that confused me, but Eugene and I did not have any difficulty answering it. We were not related. We bore the same surname, but it wasn’t strange to have two or three children in the same class and from different hometowns bearing the same surname. Eugene was short and I was tall. His nose, eyes, head and every other feature of his was different from mine. The only feature we shared was a fair complexion. That, too, was not a novelty, for we were not the only fair children in that class. But the teacher, peering into our personal records on his desk, appeared to know more than we did. To us, we were not related in any way, but he thought there might be something we did not know. “When you go home, ask your parents,” he said and dismissed us. The teacher’s question set me on a lifelong inquest into what has turned out to be the most elusive assignment of my life. The more I discovered, the more I wished the search hadn’t started in the first place. But the more answers I got, the more desperate I became about finding the true answer to the most important question of my life—who am I? That I am Yvonne Nelson is a well-established fact to outsiders, but to my family and a handful of friends, I am not Yvonne Nelson. After almost four decades of my existence, I am still as desperate as when that seed of confusion was planted in my head by a teacher who, perhaps, did not appreciate the full import of what he was doing. The search for answers was bound to begin at a certain point in my life, but his question brought some urgency and intensity to the entire enterprise. The assignment he gave us that day meant different things to Eugene and me. To Eugene, it meant exactly what the teacher said—he should ask his parents. In my case, I had no parents. I had only a parent. Eugene had a father and a mother to ask, but I had only a mother. I would later discover that Eugene, like me, had actually only one parent who was in the position to know the answer. Assignments from teachers, or what we often called “homework”, were supposed to be done at home. If we had a favourite programme on television or an important outing and didn’t want the assignment to interfere with our programme, we squeezed some time and did it in school so our day and night would be cleared for our personal stuff. The teacher’s assignment on whether Eugene and I were related was not a conventional assignment, and I did not have anything special to attend to at home, but I could not resist the urge to start it right from school. I started to scan the features of Eugene critically in order to pick hints of our biological relationship, but there was nothing useful from that exercise. When we closed that day, I continued my investigation by standing at a respectable distance to see the man who picked him up from school. The man came, and he was Mr. Nelson. As I had done in the case of Eugene, I tried to pick out features that would lend credence to a possible relationship between Mr. Nelson and me, but there was none. So, I carried the unresolved puzzle home, with a strong resolve to find an answer. On my way home that day, the teacher’s question weighed heavily on me. What I had not paid attention to started to take centre stage in my life. I was still young, but I was old enough to notice some anomalies in my family. I was awake to the stark and uncomfortable reality that I was the odd child at home. Of the four-member nuclear family in my house, there appeared to be a stronger bond among the first three occupants of that house. I felt like a stranger. When curiosity had driven me to ask my mother why the name of her popular business was Manovia, she said it represented her name and those of my two siblings. She had coined the name from the beginning, middle and ending of their respective names in order of age—Margaret, Enoch and Sylvia. My mother’s name is Margaret, and Enoch and Sylvia are her first and second children. I came last. She responded to my next query with the explanation that I had not been born at the time she established the business. I felt left out, but that was not the only or most obvious difference between my two siblings and me. At primary six, I was about 12 years old and conscious of a number of things. I was conscious of the fact that my two siblings, Enoch and Sylvia, had a surname that was different from mine. Theirs was Davies. And mine was Nelson. I didn’t take the time to know much about Davies, but in those days, I did not need to be told that he was an important somebody in the country. Lt. Col. Joseph Kabu Davies was not only a senior military officer but also someone who appeared influential. I had seen photographs of him with President Ft. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings, and that was enough to tell me his pedigree. Children of my generation grew up seeing Rawlings as an enigma. He had transitioned from a military ruler to a civilian president, but much of what we heard about him were his exploits as a soldier. He was a symbol of bravery, justice and fearlessness. His looks endeared him to many, and his antics and showmanship made him a delight to watch anytime he was on television. As far as some of us were concerned, he was among the most powerful men on earth, and whoever was close to him had to be really important. So, I rated Lt. Col. Davies, the father of my siblings, highly. When my siblings had once mentioned that my mother was pampering me, I remember her telling them that it was because my father was not there. With that background, the teacher’s question ignited in me a fierce determination to know who my father was. I also wanted to know whether the Nelson whose name I carried was the same Nelson who fathered my classmate, Eugene. My mother is not the type who is used to giving straightforward answers. She prefers to give an explanation before she responds to even close-ended questions. In the case of Mr. Nelson, however, I do not clearly recall the order in which she answered my questions. What I recall was the order in which I processed and stored that information. I recall her affirmative response to what I considered the most important question of my life. Eugene and I were, indeed, related. The teacher was right. Eugene was my brother. Before I had time to process the revelation and ask further questions, my mother went on to tell me a string of negative tales about Mr. Nelson. These negative stories were part of the reason I never felt emotionally attached to the man whose name I bear. Even if I had any emotional attachment to him, what Mr. Nelson did to me on my first visit to his house was enough to erase it all. That rejection was more painful than being jilted by the most romantic and caring lover.